3 Responses to Episode 88 – Everybody’s Infidelity Pants

So for reals, guys, we want to hear your opinions on the Woman. Listening to the show, I realize I didn’t do the best job of articulating why it pissed me off, so I’ll try again:

I feel like it’s a movie that thinks it’s making a heavy statement about gender relations. The main guy starts off mistreating women in familiar ways, and it continues into a heavy-handed allegory of the way men keep power over women, and seems to suggest the solution is to get rid of men entirely.

Which, y’know, is a conversation you could have. But I got a distinct whiff of “THIS IS IMPORTANT YOU GUYS” throughout. I thought it was the worst kind of pretentious — ignorant but thinking it’s brilliant. It didn’t have any believable human behavior to hang its premise on, and so it just got more and more dull and pretentious. And then the last fifteen minutes let go of any attempt at recognizable or even explainable behavior on the part of any of its characters, so it could have the weird Hills Have Eyes bloodbath.

Now, I like a crazy cannibal movie, and I like an intelligent descontruction of stuff movie. But if you’re going to give me a crazy cannibal movie, don’t undercut it with a bunch of Womyn’s Studies bullshit. If you’re going to give me a feminist manifesto, don’t make it a crazy cannibal movie in the final third. What you end up with is a mix of extreme feminist ideology–which is pretty suspect coming from an all-male production team–and extremely misogynistic treatment of women, all without a single believable character to hang it on.

So yeah. I didn’t hate it because it was too gross, or too exploitative of women, or too gory…I hated it because it was really dumb, thought it was really smart, and tried to hammer home a questionable moral with the subtlety of a jackhammer covered in hamfists slamming into an anvil.